The Complete McAuslan. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ hard as a gangster, and he had the M.M. in front of the Africa and Italy ribbons. A pair of stony eyes looked me over, but he didn’t say anything.

      “The run takes about seven hours,” went on the R.T.O. He stopped and shuffled his papers. He was thinking. “If you hit trouble,” he said at last, “you use your initiative. Sorry it’s not much help, but there you are. You’ve got some signallers, and the telegraph line’s never far away. You’ll be O.K. as far as Gaza anyway; after that there’s more chance of … well, anyway, it’s not likely there’ll be any bother.”

      The loudspeaker crackled again for Captain Tanner.

      “Oh, shut up!” he snapped. “Honest, it’s the only blasted name they know. Well, look, you’re off in about ten minutes. Better start getting ’em aboard. I’ll get a bleat for you on the tannoy. Best of luck.” He hurried off, and then turned back. “Oh, one other thing; there’s a captain’s wife with a baby and she thinks it’s getting German measles. I wouldn’t know.”

      He bustled off into the crowd, and as he disappeared I felt suddenly lonely and nervous. One train, two hundred people—a good third of them women and children—seemed a lot of responsibility, especially going into a country on fire with civil strife and harried by armed terrorist gangs. Two deserters, a worried padre, and possible German measles. Oh, well, first things first. How does one start clearing a crowded platform into a train?

      “Sergeant Black,” I said, “have you made this trip before?”

      “No, sir.”

      “Oh. I see. Well, start getting them aboard, will you?”

      God bless the British sergeant. He flicked his bonnet with his hand, swung round, and thundered, “All aboard for Jerusalem,” as though he had been a stationmaster all his life. The tannoy boomed into sound overhead and there was a general move towards the train. Sergeant Black moved in among the crowd, pointing and instructing—he seemed to know, by some God-given instinct, what to do—and I went to look at the engine.

      I’m no authority, but it looked pretty rickety, and the genial Arab driver seemed to be in the grip of some powerful intoxicating drug. He had a huge laugh and a glassy eye, spoke no English, and fiddled with his controls in a reckless, unnerving way. I thought of asking him if he knew the way to Jerusalem, but it would have sounded silly, so I climbed into the front carriage, dumped my hand baggage on a seat in the compartment marked “O.C. Train, Private” (with the added legend “Kilroy was here—he hated it”) and set off down the corridor to tour the train.

      It was like the lower gun-deck of the Fighting Temeraire at Trafalgar, a great heaving mass of bodies trying to sort themselves out. There were no Pullman cars, and the congestion in the carriage doorways was brutal. I worked my way through to the guard’s van, and found Sergeant Black eyeing the two deserters, tow-headed ruffians handcuffed to a staple on the wall.

      “Let them loose,” he was saying to the M.P. escort.

      “I’m responsible …” the M.P. began, and Black looked at him. There was one of those pregnant silences while I examined the instructions on the fire extinguisher, and then the M.P. muttered some defiance and unlocked the handcuffs. Sergeant Black lit a cigarette and tapped the butt of his Luger.

      “See, you two,” he said. “Run for it, and I’ll blow yer ---- heids aff.” He caught sight of me and nodded.

      “Awright this end, sir.”

      “So I see,” I said and beckoned him out in the corridor. “You think it’s safe to loose those two?”

      “Well, it’s like this. If there’s trouble, it’s no’ right they should be tied up.”

      “You mean if we hit the Stern Gang?”

      “Aye.”

      I thought about this, but not for long. There would certainly be other, more important decisions to make on the journey, and there was no point in worrying myself at this stage about the security of two deserters who were hardly likely to take off into the desert anyway. So I allotted Sergeant Black the rear half of the train, struggled back to my place at the front, checked my notorious pistol to see that it was loaded, satisfied myself that everyone was off the platform, and settled down with “The Launching of Roger Brook”, which was the current favourite with the discerning literati, although closely challenged by two other recent productions, Animal Farm and Forever Amber. The train suddenly heaved and clanked, and we were off.

      The Cairo—Jerusalem run is one of the oldest and most well-worn routes in the world. By train in those days you went due north towards the Nile delta and then swung east through Zagazig to Ismailia on the Canal. Then north along the Canal again to El Kantara, “the Bridge” by which Mary and Joseph travelled and before them Abraham. Then you are running east again along the coast, with the great waste of the Sinai on your right and the Mediterranean on your left. This was the way the world walked in the beginnings of recorded time, Roman, Arab, Assyrian, Greek; if you could talk to everyone who used this road you could write the history of the human race. Everyone was here, except the Children of Israel who made it the hard way, farther south. And now they were trying to make it again, from a different direction, over the sea from Europe and elsewhere-still the hard way, they being Jews.

      The tracks stick to the coast as far as the Palestine border, where the names become familiar, echoing childhood memories of Sunday school and the Old Testament—Rafa and Gaza and Askalon away to the left, where the daughters of the uncircumcised were getting ready to cheer for Goliath; and then the line curves slowly away from the coast to Lydda, and doubles almost back on itself for the last lap south and east into Jerusalem.

      At various points along the route Samson had destroyed the temple, Philip had begun preaching the gospel, Herod had been born, the Lord smote the thousand thousand Ethiopians, Peter cured in the name of Jesus, Solomon dreamed of being wise, and Uzziah broke down the walls of Jabneh. And Lt MacNeill, D., was following in their footsteps with Troop Train 42, which just shows that you can always go one better.

      We had just rattled through Zagazig and Roger Brook was squaring up to the finest swordsman in France when there was a knock at my door and there stood a tall, thin man with a big Adam’s apple knocking on his dog collar, wearing the purple-edged pips of the Royal Army Chaplain’s Department. He peered at me through massive horn-rims and said:

      “There are A.T.S. travelling on this train.”

      I admitted it; and he sucked in his breath.

      “There are also officers of the Royal Air Force.”

      His voice was husky, and you could see that, to his mind, Troop Train 42 was a potential White Slave Special. In his experience, R.A.F. types and A.T.S. were an explosive formula.

      “I shouldn’t worry, padre,” I said, “I’m sure …”

      “But I must worry,” he said indignantly. “After all, if we were not in this train, it would be time for Lights Out. These young girls would be asleep. The young men …” he paused; he wasn’t so sure about the young men. “I think that, as O.C. train, you should ensure that a curfew of compartments is observed after eleven o’clock,” he finished up.

      “I doubt if there’s any regulation …”

      “You could enforce it. You have the authority.”

      That was true enough: an O.C. СКАЧАТЬ